Forerunner 101

He and I have adopted walking as our exercise mode of choice. It is simple to do right here around our little condominium neighborhood, and being outside relaxes us and gets us to spend time talking with one another. It is relatively inexpensive. We have some decent shoes and socks that we invested in a number of years ago. We have headlights that we use if we happen to be walking after dark. We have some water bottles that T bought just before the surgery. That's it. Nothing fancy.

We have been using His watch (which has a stopwatch feature) to time ourselves as we walk, and we've long estimated that the path we follow is "about" a mile. Therefore, we could count laps, multiply -- and come up with an approximate distance we were walking. Hence, as we've moved up to walking four laps each day, we've calculated that we were covering four miles. Not a bad distance.

Now though, we have a new toy. He ordered a Garmin Forerunner 101 hand-held GPS unit, and we tried it out this morning. It tracks distance and time and a whole host of other interesting data. It is a neat addition to our walking gear. The very first bit of news that we got, using it on our walk today, is that our route is not quite a mile; it is actually only 0.85 of a mile. So, we haven't been walking 4 miles. We are closer to 3.4 miles. Ahhh well. Good to know.

swan